Join Berwick Visual Arts Artist in Residence Lucy Clout to celebrate the opening of her BFMAF 2018 exhibition, Solvent Magazine. Refreshments and merriment aplenty.
Programmes
The dirty beats and lo-fi stream of consciousness father and daughter duo Yeah You! (Elvin Brandhi & Mykl Jaxn) meet the left handed melodic messthetics of Glasgow’s finest: Vital Idles. Plus karaoke. All welcome!
Northern soul, R&B and club classics with DJs Carl Hudson and Michael Elliot. Free admission, all welcome.
Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival presents the premiere of Enceindre, a new commission and first collaboration between artist filmmaker Luke Fowler and acclaimed sound recordist Chris Watson. Enceindre is a study in film and sound of two 16th century fortified cities: Berwick in the North-East of England and Pamplona in the Navarre region of the North of Spain.
Berwick Visual Arts and BFMAF Artist in Residence Lucy Clout discusses Solvent Magazine, her new body of work produced in Berwick and exhibited in The Gymnasium, with Cubitt Curatorial Fellow and Cinenova working group member Louise Shelley and 2018 seminar leader Taylor Le Melle.
In this seminar, Shireen Seno and John Torres will explore Los Otros’ history and the surrounding context and community of artists and filmmakers both in the Philippines and internationally. They will also discuss their working methods and strategies for production, and will be joined by Richard Bolisay, Viknesh Kobinthan and 2018 seminar leader Taylor Le Melle.
Shot in Colombia, The Magical State depicts the possession of a Wayuu woman by a 40 million year old oil demon. Framed as an interrogation, an off-screen male voice challenges the woman, who gazes back directly into the viewer’s eyes, placing a curse on ‘man’, the species who have woken it from geological time. The violence of natural resource extraction—and the resulting violation of land rights—are reflected in the demon’s iridescent-coloured rage and stroboscopic movements.
‘Temporal Vertigo’ is a wide-ranging selection of moving image work made by artist, writer and filmmaker Sophia Al-Maria over the last seven years. As schizophrenic in form as it is in chronology, the ten works shown move from essay film to music video, documentary, narrative, performance and all points in between. Included are the two part ‘Gulf Futurism’ essay film The Future Was Desert, which images the desert as a place outside of time; enigmatic science-fiction/documentary hybrid Mothership; and two music videos for Fatima Al Qadiri. This program represents the first retrospective screening of Al-Maria’s formally rigorous and beautifully cinematic work, providing a view of visual and thematic cross-contaminations between many different projects.
Q&A with filmmaker Sophia Al-Maria
Sophia Al-Maria discusses her diverse practice—particularly the series of moving image works shown in the ‘Temporal Vertigo’ retrospective screening and The Magical State exhibition in The Magazine—with BFMAF associate programmer Herb Shellenberger and 2018 seminar leader Taylor Le Melle. Working at the intersection of cinema and contemporary art, Al-Maria’s practice occupies a singular space within the field of artists’ moving image.
A couple escape from their families and flee deep into the jungle. At nightfall, a song illustrates the innocence of their love and their search for happiness. Palme d’Or winning filmmaker Apitchatpong Weerasethakul invited fellow Thai filmmaker Pimpaka Towira to shoot a 35mm film in the forest while he observed the production though his digital camera. While Worldly Desires is dedicated to Weerasethakul’s memories of filmmaking in the jungle from 2001–05, it is also a story of forbidden love and desire, loaded with poetry, metaphor and mystery.